“Remember when feminists marched around Washington in 1992, the vaunted political ‘Year of the Woman,’ pledging to ruin the political careers of insensitive male officials who ‘just don’t get it’? Have all of those women now disappeared like Chandra Levy? ” asks columnist Brent Bozell.

The Year of the Woman, you may recall, came shortly after the Anita Hill debacle, a time in which feminists came to tell us that if men didn’t stop acting like jackasses and start acting more like eunuchs, they were ready to ruin their lives. Not all feminists, of course, participated in witch-hunts like the Thomas-Hill inquisition. In fact, some of us were horrified by the spectacle, and have been writing against the charade of hostile environment
law ever since.

Any woman who goes off her rocker over lame jokes about Coke cans and calls the sex police over trivial wisecracks does not deserve to call herself a feminist. As Camille Paglia wrote in 1992, “If Anita Hill was thrown for a loop by sexual banter, that’s her problem. If by the age of 26, as a graduate of Yale Law School, she could find no convincing way to signal her displeasure and disinterest, that’s her deficiency.”

Paglia continues: “The sexual revolution of my Sixties generation broke the ancient codes of decorum that protected respectable ladies from profanation by foul language. We demanded an end to the double standard. What troubles me about the ‘hostile workplace’ category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is antifeminist to ask for special treatment for women.”

Paglia is right, of course. Before it began its headlong march onto the victim tangent, feminism focused on making women strong and free, making more choices available in their jobs and sexual lives, and freeing everyone from overly rigid sex roles.

Today, a woman can be a real feminist – strong, accomplished, achievement-oriented, and self-empowered – or she can be a skunk at the garden party, a litigious princess, freshly taught in college that it’s OK, expected even, to ruin the careers of the guys who don’t get it. Immature young women with half-baked gender theories are sent forth wide-eyed from college into the workplace with loaded guns, but missing the basics – basics like the reality that cornered rats can be dangerous.

As subsequent events have demonstrated, sexual harassment charges have become a choice weapon in political arsenals. In 1991, feminists should have confronted Clarence Thomas directly about his anti-choice position on abortion instead of magnifying sexual minutiae. Somewhere along the line, America lost its sense of humor and sense of privacy and proportion. In turn, social conservatives jumped on the bandwagon with vigor when the opportunity arose to torpedo Bill Clinton.

Sexual harassment law is the juncture where victim feminists and social conservatives have joined forces because both philosophies hinge on rigidly stark sexual stereotypes that portray powerful men as sexual predators, and young women as their bimbo prey. When Bozell writes that Chandra Levy was “a young woman who was used as a plaything by a married congressman twice her age,” and that “feminists have no outrage for the manipulator who lied about the affair,” he is merely repeating the predictable conservative parable, as old as “Little Red Riding Hood,” the story that the world consists of babes in the woods and big bad wolves waiting to trick them.

The Gary Condit story is a perfect cautionary tale for social conservatives who see white bread family values as the only way women should live: stay home, practice abstinence, get married, have children and be protected from a big bad world that is too immoral and dangerous for women.

For feminists, the Gary Condit story is more complex and sobering. Chandra Levy’s mother says she raised Chandra to be strong, confident, independent and free of the fears with which she herself had been raised. Armed with a mind of her own, Chandra had been taught to compete successfully with males in athletics and academics. In her daily life, she was no plaything or delicate flower, but an intelligent young woman who was nobody’s victim until she, as the saying goes, went missing.

Ironically, the victim-wing of feminism has created a workplace environment more hostile than ever by conferring on all women the status of incipient sexual terrorists who, when some bozo “doesn’t get it,” can whip out the equivalent of a suitcase bomb. Like all forms of terrorism, sexual blackmail, real or perceived, is no small thing. In a world where nothing is personal and nothing is private, when you screw up with a woman at work or in love, your career can be toast. Perhaps Mr. Condit thought Chandra had a bomb and was willing to use it. I suspect that may be the real reason Chandra Levy is missing.

Eight hundred and sixty thousand of Housing and Urban Development’s taxpayer
dollars were recently discovered to have gone to Michelle Lusson’s “Creative
Wellness” program, an assortment of New Age treatments including incense
burning, lucky stones, sexual healing and color therapy. Scheduled to be
taught in public housing centers in 26 cities across the country, the program
gave whole new meaning to the term “Voodoo Lounge Tour.”

After some digging, the New York Post’s Brian Blomquist uncovered invoices in
the “Creative Wellness” project for expenses including $3,240 for color
charts, $6,270 for gem bags, $3,174 for incense packs, $6,255 for aroma oils
and $624 for nutrition kits that included sugar, salt, candy and Jim Beam
whiskey. All the funds were drawn from HUD’s drug-fighting budget.

Here’s the way it works. In step one of Ms. Lusson’s feel-good recipe for
“Creative Wellness,” public housing residents are identified as one of 14
different types, determined by pinpointing the weakest and strongest glands
in their bodies.

In step two, “Wellness” professionals who are gifted in something called
“Applied Kinesiology” find out which one of the “gods” or “goddesses” each
public housing resident represents. A woman may be, for example, a “Minerva,”
and a guy may be an “Apollo.” Step three, the healing, is about getting the
Karma right, lighting up the right incense aroma, wearing pants and hats that
color coordinate with one’s gods, glandular points and goddesses.

Ms. Lusson, with zero professional training in medicine or nutrition and an
$860,000 federal contract in her pocket, gave the Post an example: “If you
have a thyroid disease or an obesity problem, you don’t wear red around your
neck. All other colors are fine. Certain colors aggravate certain energy
systems in the body that have an impact on the glands, like red on the
thyroid.”

And if the crackheads in your building are staging rooftop pit bull fights
and flinging the underdogs to the street below? “Rose is kind of a universal
odor that will go right to the brain stem and relax you,” says Lusson.
“Lavender is also a calmative for the brain stem.” And if there’s a shortage
of sex? “If you have low libido and you’re adrenal type D, the smell of musk
stimulates the creative urges in yourself to get up and go.”

All this sounds like a lot of fun, and who knows, some of it might even work.
Right now, as I write, I think it’d do me good to hear James Brown singing
“I Feel Good” enveloped in a purple haze in a white room with black curtains
and the scent of musk and clove flavored incense floating through my limbic
region, but why should the taxpayers fund it?

Taxpayers, hardworking and practical people that they are, want us to keep
our crystal visions to ourselves and pay for them too. They pay for their own
creative wellness, after all.

I can just imagine what Gary the auto body guy
would say about his tax dollars funding mood rings and goddess religions
since he has to pay for his own good vibrations after a 12-hour shift
rebuilding wrecked cars. He pays for his Merlot and 7-Up Spritzers with the
money he’s earned pounding dents and ripping fenders.

His brother who owns a
tanning salon mellows out with Stoli’s Ice Picks and Frank Sinatra singing
“My Way.” Donny the bus driver’s Dr. Feelgood is Captain Morgan Original
Spiced Rum with Coke in the biggest glass you can get while dancing to
“Memory Motel.” Cathy and Phil who work for the post office drink Cuervo and
Coors Light and play “Take This Job and Shove It” to keep from going postal.
Other locals, more spiritually inclined, stand all night in a four block line
waiting for Virgin Mary images to appear on the wall of a Brookline dormer.
Rosary beads or love beads, whatever gets you through the night.

A spokesman for former HUD head Andrew Cuomo blames Lusson’s $860,000
contract on a “rogue action by a lone civil servant.” In fact, the money was
handed to Lusson by HUD bureaucrat Gloria Cousar, a longtime friend and
co-worshipper with Lusson in a church in Herndon, Va., known as the
Center for Holistic Healing, and approved by Howard Lucas, a Cuomo political
appointee.

The whole thing may be seen as nothing more than an attempt by co-worshippers
Lusson and Cousar to get a jump on the idea of delivering “faith-based”
solutions to poverty, a concept much loved and religiously promoted by the
Bush team. In any case, whether it’s the wrong “faith” or wrong incense, the
program’s been axed by the White House.

“The upper echelon of Washington really doesn’t know the needs of the
people,” says Lusson, offering as testimony a letter from a woman who was
sleep-deprived for years in Alabama’s public housing until she met her own
black magic woman in Lusson’s curative powers. Now she sleeps like a baby.
The cure? “I cleaned out my closet,” she explains, “and removed the
dark-green bedding.”

Late in the year 2000, while chads were still being counted in Florida, and before Bill Clinton’s black helicopter lifted off its pad for what may or may not be the last time, Larry Nichols, a former Clinton employee in Little Rock dialed up the “Quinn in the Morning” talk show at WRRK-FM in Pittsburgh and whispered in his Arkansas twang, “Quinn … Quinn … they’re not leaving.” Referring to the Clintons, of course, Nichols, a frequent long-distance caller to Jim Quinn’s Morning Militia, has been long convinced that the Clintons would never go away.

Like many Clinton-crazies, Larry Nichols has spent the last eight years afraid for his life. Sounding a bit panicky, he usually calls from somewhere in hiding. I picture him with his telephone, hunched under a blanket in a Bates psycho motel near an Arkansas highway, looking over his shoulder with furtive glances toward the door. Not only was Nichols convinced that Bill Clinton wasn’t leaving and that Hillary would have to be pried away like a
Halloween cat clinging to the Oval Office drapes, but he was a big-time believer in the “Arkancides,” those 56 suspicious and untimely deaths around Clinton that many believed to be murders.

This is what the Clinton presidency was like: White House counsel Vince Foster found dead in Fort Marcy Park; Ron Brown, who had said he was not going down alone, died with plenty of others in a plane crash; the next-door neighbor of Gennifer Flowers beaten to within an inch of his life; former Clinton security chief Jerry Parks gunned down in broad daylight at a Little Rock intersection. And there were more. Bizarre stories gushed forth like a muddy geyser out of Hot Springs.

We tried to find out what was happening, but never really could. Every once in awhile there was a glint here, or a glimmer there, like a silver fish under murky waters, but you couldn’t get your hands around it. The Clinton team always had a colorful cast of tough disarming characters ready to beat back the fuddy-duddies who thought something sinister was going down.

Clinton aide Anne Lewis, who looked like a talking teapot from a children’s fairy tale, declared with a wave of her short chubby arms that the Filegate scandal, resulting from two White House security agents haplessly receiving an overflow of Republican FBI files that gushed forth like unstoppable suds from an “I Love Lucy” washing machine, was just a “Sesame Street Snafu.”

Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca, the Ernie and Bert of Filegate, were dismissed by George Stephanopoulos as morons. “Filegate was a bureaucratic f—-up by two morons,” he told Vanity Fair.

“Hell, you work for Bill Clinton, you go up and down more times than a whore’s nightgown,” quipped James Carville. “Nuttin’ to be excited about yet.”

Referring to the sexual harassment lawsuit in which, among other things,
Paula Jones charged that she was asked to kiss then-Governor Clinton’s crooked member, which took a strange veer to the left, the New York Observer editorialized at the beginning of Clinton’s second term, “This is the first swearing in of a president where 40% of the electorate was thinking about the president’s penis. Right now there is a trailer parked on Pennsylvania Avenue, and we are a trailer park nation. Enjoy the next four years.”

And a trailer park nation we were. Like friends around a campfire listening to ghost stories, I used to wake up on winter mornings while it was still dark and tune my bedside radio to “Quinn in the Morning” for the latest tales of black helicopter sightings and calls from Arkansas witnesses who had seen shady capers, train deaths and drug deals going down near Mena. Like kids who love to hear “Where the Wild Things Are” read over and over while hiding under the blankets, conspiracies can be fun.

Larry Nichols was my favorite caller to the Morning Militia, the former Clinton-appointed employee of the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, who the Clintons called a “pathological liar” but who had lots of scoops. The latest “Arkancide,” Larry confided to the captivated radio audience one dark morning in a breathless stage whisper, was one of his “witnesses.” He would call back tomorrow morning to tell us who it was. Stay tuned.

Larry and others made it their business to report anything unusual at the Mena airport, tidbits they might have picked up on the Internet, like when a runway was being lengthened. You’d be amazed how many people on the Internet live within sight of Mena. These folks may be swamp dwellers, but they’re not dumb. They knew that during the Clinton presidency, which New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd described in a prophetic pre-Monica column as an “exploding cigar, where the only absolute certainty is no certainty,”
paranoia could employ ya.

Each conspiracy on Quinn’s show had a theme song. “Smuggler’s Blues” by Glen Frye was played for Mena updates, and “Burnin’ Down the House” was the Janet Reno theme song. When Clinton aide Dickie Morris was caught by the national media sucking someone’s toes in a Washington hotel room, Quinn put out a call for the song “Popsicle Toes.” I had “Popsicle Toes” and drove it to Quinn’s house for the Dickie Morris updates, which he played along with a lot of sucking and slurping sounds. My husband gave Quinn a copy of
Streisand’s long drawn-out live version of “He Touched Me” for the sexual harassment update (conservatives were against sexual harassment laws until Ms. Jones erupted with stories about the president. Like a sign from on high, like 666 emblazoned as the sign of a beast, even his penis was crooked!).

Not a person to believe in conspiracy theories, I never bought a tabloid in my life, except for the time The Star ran the irresistible headline “Family Flees Talking Doll” (which co-incidentally, as a result of my involvement in the vast right-wing conspiracy, actually happened to me later in real life). But many of the bizarre stories were intriguing. Not wanting to be perceived as someone who belonged to what Al Gore referred to as the “extra-chromosome crowd,” I gleaned my info-nuggets from a wide array of “legitimate” sources — like The Wall Street Journal which editorialized that “Bill Clinton’s Arkansas was a very strange place” and Joe Klein, the New Yorker’s respected political writer who wrote “Primary Colors,” portraying Clinton aide Betsey Wright, the woman in charge of “bimbo eruptions,” as someone who pointed a loaded gun at Clinton enemies telling them to “get their mind right.” Even Bob Dole’s ad man, Michael Murphy, announced that he was
teaching his pet parrot, Ernie, to repeat, “Whitewater — guilty as sin!”

“I accuse President Clinton of murder,” proclaimed Dr. Jack Wheeler in his column in Strategic Investors, a financial newsletter published by James Davidson, author of “Blood in the Streets.” Wheeler specifically accused Bill Clinton of ordering his personal goon squad of Arkansas state troopers and ex-troopers to kill Luther “Jerry” Parks, the former Clinton security chief who had been gunned down in Little Rock in 1993. “Parks,” said Wheeler,
“was a Little Rock private investigator hired by Vince Foster to collect an extensive surveillance file on then-Governor Clinton, which included Clinton’s participation in cocaine and sex parties at his brother Roger’s apartment.”

James Davidson, founder of the National Taxpayer’s Union, was once a heavy financial backer of Bill Clinton but had since become an ardent foe and sponsor of research into the death of Vince Foster. Warned by his lawyers that he was risking not only his credibility but a libel suit as well if his newsletter was wrong about the charges against Clinton, Davidson hired investigators to check out the allegations coming out of Little Rock. The investigators, said to be shocked at what they found, advised Davidson that he had no need to fear any libel or slander suits.

On the morning after the disappearance of former CIA Director William Colby, I was reading my copy of Strategic Investors, which was announcing that the publisher had financed a trio of top handwriting experts who had just declared that Vince Foster’s suicide note was a forgery. The newsletter also announced that former CIA Director Colby had just joined the board of Strategic Investors. It was a mighty strange thing to be reading right at the very time the news wires were reporting that Colby had just been declared missing from his vacation cabin.

Colby had left for a canoe ride, leaving his radio on and his computer screen glowing in the dark, and a half-eaten clam dinner on his plate. He was a cautious man, said his wife, a man who would never go out canoeing in two-foot-high whitecaps with 25 mph sea winds. Shortly thereafter, his body was found without shoes or lifejacket, which his wife said he always wore. Chills ran up my spine. I could feel the sea winds billow under my life jacket
… I mean sweater!

The scuttlebutt about Bill Clinton’s connections to drugs and political murders by the Dixie Mafia was once taken about as seriously by the national media as Elvis sightings at the K-Mart, but little by little it was nonetheless being checked out. The New York Times sent writer Philip Weiss to Little Rock get the lowdown. Weiss, a witty, urbane, New York liberal was an unlikely convert to right-wing nuthood, but between the lines of his article, “The Clinton Crazies,” you could tell he didn’t think they were so crazy after all.

Weiss, who had voted for Clinton, later wrote an article for the New York Observer portraying Clinton as a “backwoods governor who allowed ‘rough justice’ in Arkansas,” a state with a “tradition of vigilante violence,” a place “so poor that primitive men with third grade educations were elected sheriff in the 1980s.” Weiss wrote about Forrest City Sheriff Conlee, a man who proudly displayed the pickled testicles of a castrated rape suspect on
his office shelf. The accused rapist, Wayne Drummond, insists to this day that he is innocent of the rape of a distant Clinton cousin.

Shortly after Bill Clinton’s re-election, the White House issued a 331-page report to counter the unending flow of bizarre stories. Entitled the “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” the White House report designated Pittsburgh publisher and billionaire Richard Scaife as the mastermind who engineered the vast right-wing conspiracy from his media mother ship at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. (In case you missed it, by the way, WND editor Joseph Farah is the only journalist fingered by name in the report.)

Clinton spokesman James Carville, looking like a space alien who’d just shuffled his way down a gangplank of a mother ship himself, dismissed the anti-Clinton stories as
just blatherings of the trailer trash. “You drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find. I know these people. I went to school with them. I necked with them. I spent nights with them.”

During the Clinton years, it was impossible for writers not to make fools of ourselves. If you ignored the conspiracy stories, you were boring and irrelevant, and if you researched them, there was such a blizzard of contradictory dots, you never really knew if you were a wing-nut or if you were onto something.

And a fate momentarily worse than death was the day my editor at an obscure little newspaper in Pittsburgh, The Observer, got an angry call from Jackie Judd. It was the Jackie Judd, calling the editor about me, a nobody from Pittsburgh, and a grandmother to boot, long distance from ABC News in Washington, D.C., demanding to know where I had received my information. She wanted to know where I had gotten my quote about her, and she wanted it now. “When she calls you, if you can’t remember where you got it,” my editor told me, “just cry.”

When Ms. Judd called back she said a relative in Pittsburgh had sent her my article, “Skeleton Stampede,” about the skeletons in Clinton’s closet. “I can’t open up my closet,” Clinton had once confessed to his friend David Ifshin during the 1992 campaign. “I’ll get crushed by my skeletons.”

Judd was being called on the official ABC carpet to defend some of her statements about the Clinton White House. I had quoted her as saying, “The White House views this as a war, and they’re going to use whatever they can to win it.” So far so good. Judd admitted to saying that. I had received the quote from Micah Morrison at the Wall Street Journal. But the second part of my sentence was wrong. I had misquoted Judd by inadvertently blurring the sentence with two words, saying that she had said ABC News had “unbelievable battles” with the Clinton White House, when it was actually a source at ABC news other than Judd who had given the Wall Street Journal that information. I apologized for the misquote and Judd said she would call back if she needed me to back up her story. Whew!

The White House was reaching deep to intimidate the press — as Bill Clinton had threatened he would do immediately upon his reelection!

At a victory celebration in a Little Rock hotel on his re-election night, Bill Clinton had promised to “spend a lot of time going after detractors who pursued him on Whitewater and other ethical questions.” His enemies, he declared, had “hurt a lot of people in our state with their systematic abuse.” Calling his political attackers “a cancer,” he vowed to “cut them
out of American politics.” Strong language from a winner!

We might expect this kind of venting from a loser with fresh wounds, but who would expect to run into such a nasty winner? Ungracious winners with the full power of the federal government at their disposal can be a frightening prospect.

Relaxing on Air Force One later that night, Mr. Clinton told reporters it was the Oklahoma bombing that proved to be the turning point in his political fortunes. “The bombing broke a spell in the country as the people began searching for our common ground again,” he explained. “Our one duty to the victims of Oklahoma is to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil.”

Adept at the exploitation of tragedies and the politics of division, Clinton had been demagoging the Oklahoma catastrophe before the ashes had cooled. He was apparently oblivious to the fact that those on the other side of the political divide saw the dark force that had given rise to the evil of Oklahoma as him. Though the administration tried to smear right-wing critics, radio talk show listeners, militia members and Republicans as fellow travelers of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, McVeigh turned out to be a virtual loner who was enraged by the incineration of 80 Americans at Waco, a needless incineration that was directly produced by the reckless and irresponsible decision-making processes of the Clinton administration.

“Who are these people,” Clinton asked shortly after the Oklahoma bombing, “who say they love their country but hate their government?” More politics of division and inflammatory rhetoric from a man who knew full well from his participation in the anti-war movement that you can vehemently protest government policies without hating your country. These people who “hate their government” were people just like he was when he proclaimed that he “loathed the military.” Understanding political radicals, because he was once one of them himself, would have given a wiser man an edge in unifying and leading
the country, but Bill Clinton chose to inflame and divide, fueling the opposition’s rage just as surely as his heavy-handed policies at Waco had fueled the rebellion there. In the end, he was no better a leader than his ’60s nemesis, Richard Nixon. He had learned nothing.

Perhaps because the Clinton administration had viewed Pittsburgh as the home of the mastermind of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” the place from where the “cancer” had sprung, the city seemed to get a little more White House attention than others. When the head of HUD visited town, he pointed across the Monongahela river at a forsaken little town called Braddock and asked if that was where the Morning Militia met. On June 4, 1996, Pittsburghers had a bizarre experience — an unannounced nighttime invasion of black helicopters playing war games over city streets, zooming over McKeesport and Braddock. “Not Armageddon, Just Noisy Helicopter Training,” said the next morning’s headline in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“World War III did not break out along the Three Rivers last night,” reported Post-Gazette staff writer Michael Newman. “It just sounded like it. As part of a U.S. Department of Defense training exercise, helicopters flew low along the Monogahela, Ohio and Allegheny rivers, from McKeesport to McKees Rocks to the Strip District. They were accompanied by a frighteningly realistic soundtrack of exploding bombs and crackling gunfire. Residents from throughout the area called their local police. One man said the commotion was so loud, his wife went into labor. An official at Pittsburgh’s emergency-management center said the exercises were part of the Defense Department’s normal training. He said last night’s exercises were designed to help helicopter pilots learn to fly at night in urban areas. The exercises, sponsored by local police departments, including the city’s, started shortly after dark and lasted until after midnight.”

“It Would Have Been Nice to Warn Us,” said a headline the next day, followed the day after by “Military Retreats in Face Of Anger: Public’s Reaction Was Too Negative, Army Announces.”

Said Lt. Col. Ken McGraw of the Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, “In light of the public reaction, we re-evaluated our training schedule and determined we really couldn’t do much of our training without disruptions to Pittsburgh residents and thought it would be better to cancel it.”

Asked about the safety of flying the Black Hawk helicopters at night over heavily populated areas, McGraw said, “I’m never going to tell you nothing [sic] is foolproof.” He said that in other cities, such as Atlanta, Dallas and Chicago, where similar exercises had been held over the last few years, public reaction had never been anything like in Pittsburgh.

U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., stated that he had been “left with the impression from a meeting with officers at the Special Operations Command” that the training was in part to prepare troops should their expertise be necessary at the Atlanta Olympics. Others said the Army was concerned that conditions in certain cities are ripe for racial conflict. The morning after Pittsburgh’s helicopter invasion, Tom Marr, a Philadelphia talk show host said that invariably in these situations the “black helicopter crowd” comes out of the woodwork, spreading rumors that the Pentagon is ready to aim its guns at American citizens.

Whatever the reason, the black helicopter crowd did get angry — and pour out of the woodwork they did! Some even poured into the streets in their underwear during the treetop anti-terrorist maneuvers by nine Army helicopters that swooped through with mock gunfire and explosions that shook the ground.

“In my granma’s neighborhood,” said waitress Kelly Toth, “people laid down in the streets. The noises came in through the open windows. The helicopters were flying so low you could’ve hit them with a broom handle. They thought the communists were coming to take over, or that it was aliens!”

The owner of La Dolce Vita Sweet Shop in Bloomfield, Pittsburgh’s Little Italy, said he wasn’t surprised to see masked soldiers sliding down ropes onto rooftops from helicopters. “They’ve been doing extractions around here for a long time,” he said, referring to Pittsburgh’s missing persons.

Another woman peering out her apartment window in the wee hours at the black helicopters said, “Oh my God, the militia was right!” On the other hand, Granpa Bup, a World War II vet, said, “These people are crybabies. They should’ve felt the ground shake when a 3,000 pound bomb was dropped on London!”

And so it went, on and on like a novel. Sure, there were nuts in the movement, and I met a few of them, and for awhile was one of them. I was getting so paranoid that when I got a call from the Make-A-Wish Foundation for a donation, I thought it was a death threat! How could it be otherwise, after all, the whole conspiracy food chain thing was said to have started down the street from where I live at the newspaper we call “The Trib.” Sometimes I wrote op-eds for the Trib. But what if Woodward and Bernstein had been dismissed because they met some kook-show named Deep Throat who hung out in underground parking garages?

I admit I went on the conspiracy tour, roamed around in the tall grass in Fort Marcy Park to check out the cannons, looked for the missing bullet and all the rest. In the end, though, I concluded that Chris Ruddy, author of “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster,” was wrong, and that Ken Starr had gotten it right in declaring Foster’s death a suicide.

Others still aren’t so sure, like the lady I met at a Quinn think-tank, at a bar called Kangaroo’s. Introducing herself as a member of the West Virginia militia, she said she had been run off the road by the CIA on the way to the meeting. She explained that lead paint had been outlawed by the government because they wanted to see through our walls with infrared equipment from satellites. To outfox them, she had added lead to her no-lead paint and was there to give us her formula for adding lead.

I figured she might have been an FBI agent, fishing for wing-nuts.

With the Clinton presidency over and G.W. now in office, the only thing we can say for sure is that the biggest nut-ball of them all has just left the building. The lunatics had indeed taken over the asylum, to the tune of “Hail to the Chief.” With Bill Clinton and his wife gone from Pennsylvania Ave., it’s a good bet that we’ll be hearing nothing from the militias, the wing-nuts and the Arkansas fever swamp folks. Even the Internet will simmer down — if it hasn’t already. And no matter how much the liberals complain about George W.,
they will never have to deal with what we did.

I’m no Dionne Warwick with a crystal ball, but I have some solid predictions about the Bush administration: I know Laura Bush won’t go on TV to announce that any of us
are free-loaders. Condoleezza Rice won’t be visiting Al Sharpton with a gun telling him to get his mind right. Mary Matalin won’t be found dead in Fort Marcy Park. Christie Whitman won’t threaten to break anyone’s knee-caps. Even the pro-life ideologue Ashcroft won’t incinerate 80 feminists at the NOW headquarters. And no one in the Secret Service will have any tales about George W. leaving the White House rolled up in a blanket in the floor of a
car having phone sex with an intern.

Clinton’s legacy? Easy. It’ll be two things: his resilience in the face of a self-induced pummeling and, as Hillary put it at the end of the Lewinsky-impeachment saga, that you could say a lot of things about Bill Clinton, but he was never boring.

The Clinton Justice Department is now micro-managing deliveries of
Domino’s Pizza. Domino’s, after being bullied into compliance by
administration officials, has recently agreed to deliver pizza to
neighborhoods it had shunned because of risks to its drivers, 24 of whom
have been killed on the job.

The Justice Department said that all people, regardless of race or
creed, have a right to pizza. Administration officials asserted that
Domino’s, in business for 40 years and now the world’s largest pizza
delivery company, was essentially guilty of racial profiling because it
permitted its drivers to avoid neighborhoods that they considered to be
too dangerous.

“What about the right of all people,” regardless of race or creed,
“to avoid getting killed?” asked Investor’s Business Daily. “Call us
crazy, but that right would seem to trump the Justice’s Department’s
newly found right to pizza.”

This case brings to mind a 1997 case in Pittsburgh in which an
African-American couple, Carl and Shelia Truss, filed a complaint with
the city’s Human Relations Commission regarding Pizza Hut’s refusal to
deliver them a sausage pizza on May 2, 1992, the night of the rioting in
Los Angeles set off by the Rodney King verdict. After being informed
that there weren’t any deliveries, Shelia Truss told the Pizza Hut clerk
that all was peaceful in her neighborhood. “What does what’s going on
in California have to do with me?” she asked. Her attorney, Ann Simms,
claimed that Pizza Hut was guilty of an unlawful public accommodation
practice. In his initial reaction to the case, Charles Morrison, the
director of the HRC in Pittsburgh, stated that Pizza Hut’s failure to
deliver to the Trusses was most likely a case of “illegal redlining.”

“We wanted to err on the side of caution,” explained Mike Logan, the
local manager of the Pizza Hut, at the HRC hearing. When the store
first opened, located near Pittsburgh’s upper Hill District, a mostly
African-American section of the city, also known as Sugar Top, it
delivered pizza to the Hill. Deliveries were stopped at night only
after the repeated robberies of its drivers. Logan testified that the
sight on TV of white truck driver Reginald Denny being pulled from his
cab and beaten by rioters simply increased the safety concerns of the
company.

Announcing that Pittsburgh’s HRC had “declared war on pizza shops,”
and fearing that they were going to be forced to deliver to unsafe
neighborhoods, a grass-roots group formed the Pittsburgh Pizza Coalition,
organized by Dan Sullivan, a local libertarian activist who had worked a
few months earlier for the same Pizza Hut outlet that he now said was
being smeared by the HRC. “I went to work there when that shop first
opened,” he said. “We went door-to-door in the Hill District,
delivering coupons for discounts on pizzas. The shop definitely wanted
to do business in that neighborhood.”

Sullivan explained what then happened: “We had drivers robbed every
day. We had the same driver robbed three times in one week. They
usually robbed us with a gun. They know we’re not allowed to carry a
gun or more than $20. Drivers would quit after a couple of days.”

Vowing not to give up their rights, or their lives, without a fight,
pizza drivers and shop owners held a demonstration on the steps of
Pittsburgh’s City-County Building. “I won’t die for a $9 pie!” read the
Magic Marker inscription on the raised pizza box lid of Jane Wadsworth,
owner of Pizza Outlet. Her husband, she said, once had a loaded gun
held to his head while delivering. “I’ve been robbed” read the pizza
box sign carried by Alexander Lifshitz, a Russian emigre’ who delivered
pizza to support his family.

“In memory of Jay Weiss,” read another of the homemade signs. Weiss,
a 34-year-old father of three children, was murdered in 1993 while
delivering for Chubby’s Pizza in the Manchester area of Pittsburgh. He
was accompanying another driver, Paul Puhac, who was apprehensive about
delivering alone. Both men were shot, Weiss fatally.

Pittsburgh police reported that a few blocks away, while Weiss was
bleeding to death in the street, two teenagers who lived in an abandoned
house ate the pizza that they’d ordered as a ruse in order to rob the
drivers. The coroner’s deputies at the scene said that people in the
crowd laughed out loud as they removed the body of Jay Weiss. Veteran
homicide detectives shook their heads in disbelief.

At a break in the HRC hearing, I suggested to attorney Simms that the
Pizza Hut case seemed not to be about racial discrimination but about
the store’s concern for the safety of its drivers. “Bulls—!” she
replied, obviously unconvinced that a multinational corporation, or
maybe any business at all I would guess, could have any concern
whatsoever for its employees’ lives. After all, a long political
tradition has been established that only left-wingers and personal
injury attorneys care about deaths on the job. One can only imagine, of
course, how eager Ms. Simms, a personal injury attorney, and her cohorts
would be to sue if any company was found to have forced a driver into a
dangerous area in which he was injured or killed.

“How did you feel when you couldn’t get a pizza?” Simms asked her
clients at the hearing. “I felt sad and ashamed,” replied Carl Truss.
Mrs. Truss testified that she was stewing, spastic, venting, hyper, and
obsessed after the delivery refusal and walked across the street in her
pajamas to visit her attorney friend, Simms, to complain that she
couldn’t get a pizza. Ms. Simms then filed the complaint with the HRC,
resulting in a four year investigation of Pizza Hut.

During the hearing, I wondered how the Trusses would feel if a young
black man, maybe their son, were forced to deliver a pizza to a
neighborhood where the KKK was up in arms. Most of us would consider it
a travesty for a store owner to force a black driver into such an area.

“We had looked at it every which way and couldn’t see Pizza Hut’s
defense as legitimate,” HRC director Morrison initially told the
Pittsburgh newspapers. “More likely than not,” he said, the refusal to
deliver was a case of “racial discrimination.” One wondered if Mr.
Morrison had thought about why Pizza Hut, a company that had grown so
large by meeting customer’s needs, would really want to walk away from
business just so they could discriminate? By the end of the hearing,
following the protests by the Pizza Coalition and the testimony of the
drivers, the HRC had changed its mind and the case against Pizza Hut was
dismissed.

On the morning of Rudy Giuliani’s resignation from the New York Senate
race due to prostate cancer, the “Wall Street Journal” ran an editorial by
William Bennett calling for Rudy to drop out due to his extramarital
relationship with Judy Nathan. Despite Giuliani’s accomplishments as mayor
of New York City, which even Mr. Bennett acknowledges are “among the most
impressive governing achievements of modern times,” Giuliani, advised the
Virtue Czar, should hang a scarlet “A” around his neck and slouch off into
the sunset.

Bennett dismissed the real problem, Giuliani’s health, which happens to
be cancer, a mere blip on the radiology screen next to the more important
problem as Bennett sees it — searching out and destroying sexual sinners. I
could not help but compare Bennett’s uncharitable reaction to Giuliani’s
troubles to the announcement by Bennett’s other chosen pariahs, the Log
Cabin Republicans, who offered Giuliani heartfelt compassion.

After the Clinton uproar, one would have hoped that the sexual scandal
hounds would have finally had enough, that their appetite for sexual purges
would have finally been sated. But no. Who else in this country, I wondered,
besides William Bennett and a few social conservatives, and maybe Catherine
MacKinnon and an assorted feminist or two, could relish another such
episode?

Bennett, who is currently writing a book on marriage and the family,
believes that the Gary Hart brouhaha, in which the candidate was chased
through the streets like a common witch by citizens of Salem posing as
reporters, was a good thing. Hart, finally nabbed red-handed on a yacht
known as the Monkey Business, was forced to withdraw, “affirming an
important public standard,” says Bennett. Well, I can understand that. After
all, Hart was a Democrat.

But Rudy is a Republican, a member of Bennett’s own party, and one who
turned the worm-infested Big Apple back into a thriving metropolis, causing
one to wonder what “public standard” it is that Mr. Bennett would like to
affirm. That witch-hunts are high points in the cultural life of a nation?
That we consider hanging out with Judith Nathan more important than beating
back the mob? That we are arrogant and presumptuous enough to understand the
inner workings of the Giuliani-Hanover marriage? And that micro-managing
this marriage is more important than say, revitalizing Times Square or
civilizing the subways?

Does Mr. Bennett believe we should continue careening hell-bent down the
road of making ourselves into a nation of sexual hysterics? That we continue
to look upon sexual transgressions as a litmus test and the biggest
blackball gotcha game in town for presidential candidates, military officers
and CEOs? That we reaffirm a sexual standard that causes Supreme Court
nominees to have their garbage cans ransacked and their videotape rentals
scoped for pornography? That we elevate sexually questionable jokes to the
level of thought crimes that can destroy one’s career? I have a thesaurus,
but the only word I can come up with that describes America’s recent
preoccupation with sexual minutiae is “insane.” It’s not only that we remain
so focused on these witch-hunts, but that the penalty for any transgression
is so excessive.

I was horrified by the televised spectacle of a black man, Clarence
Thomas, working his entire life to attain a judgeship, reduced to lying on
the floor of his home in the fetal position, crying, due to the insanity of
his nomination process. Even assuming that Anita Hill, dragged out of her
private existence by the anointed politicos, told the truth and Thomas had,
in fact, told her a couple dirty jokes, is that enough to cancel out a
lifetime of work? To kill a career? Off with his head!

Shall we reaffirm the “public standard” that caused the first female
bomber pilot, Kelly Flinn, to have her career reduced to rubble because she
dated a man she thought was separated from his wife and then lied about it
to her commanding officer? This woman lied about an affair, she’ll lie about
anything, bellowed the Rush Limbaughs and Bill Bennetts. This woman
disobeyed orders, she’ll disobey them again, they gloated, as they
blackballed a woman from the “feminized” military. “What’s a woman doing
flying a B-52 bomber anyway?” roared Patrick Buchanan. This slutty loose
cannon, went the right-wing scuttlebutt, is liable to do anything. This nut
might drop a 20-megaton bomb on Chicago!

And so, Bill Bennett wants us to reaffirm a “public standard” that says
we are single-minded and simple-minded enough, yea stupid enough, to expunge
Rudy Giuliani from public life due to our disapproval of his marital
situation, possibly ceding the New York Senate race to a Hillary Clinton?

It seems almost preposterous now, but I remember a time, back in the days
before the puritanical right and the feminist left joined forces, before the
joint triumph of Catherine MacKinnon and William Bennett, before the sexual
juggernaut had given us sexual litmus tests and sexual harassment laws, when
America was so outrageously laissez faire that I could actually do something
as mundane as hiring chefs for our restaurant because they were the best
cook. There was a time in America, I will tell my grandchildren, when I
could hire someone without contemplating whether or not he was a Romeo, but
because he made the best soup. There was a short time in America, I will
tell my granddaughter, when women were free. I’ll tell her there was a time,
sometime between the Victorian era and the ’90s, when I could
enthusiastically hire a female bartender and not worry that she was so
delicate and offended that she might hear herself called “Honey” and bring
down the house.

Insane as it may seem, there was a time in America, I’ll say to my
grandchildren, when privacy existed, when people’s career accomplishments
were actually separated from their sexual lives, when you knew that your
heart surgeon was there because of his surgical skills rather than because
of the state of his marriage or on the basis of some jokes he told to some
nurses. Think of it. Suppose you go for heart surgery and get the guy whose
number four in line? Number one was eliminated due to an affirmative action
quota, two was a sexual harasser and three was an adulterer. The more litmus
tests, the less quality job performance, whether it’s heart surgery or
public service.

If lust shall be a litmus test, I’d like to ask Bill Bennett about the
other deadly sins. What about lack of charity, which Christ said was the
most important virtue? Or how about gluttony, pride and sloth? It’s fair, I
think, to ask William Bennett in the full regalia of his unbearable
smugness, if he thinks fat guys should be barred from publishing books.

Yes, it is time this overstuffed turkey be asked some serious questions
about the state of his own soul, and if he, with all that excessive girth,
should be still cluck, cluck, clucking about who should resign due to their
sins.

As for Rudy Giuliani, I don’t care if he’s too sexy for the slow lane,
too sexy for William Bennett or too sexy for the church guys. I don’t care
if he has a whole harem tucked away behind the pantry door. The only one who
needs to be concerned with that is Donna Hanover.

And speaking of the church guys setting sexual standards, didn’t the
original church guy, Jesus, do just that a long time ago? When an adulteress
was brought before him by an angry mob, didn’t he ask who among them would
like to cast the first stone? Well, Jesus, we finally have a volunteer! Bill
Bennett has just stepped up to the plate with a truckload of rocks.

In the movie “Rules Of Engagement,” the Oscar-nominated documentary about the massacre at Waco, Harvard psychiatrist and lawyer Alan Stone says that when he was first appointed by the Justice Department to the panel investigating Waco, he “thought the main problem would be to understand the psychology of the people inside the compound. “After I got into it,” he says, “I quickly became aware that the psychology of the people outside the compound was more important to coming to an understanding of the problem.”

The Davidians had undergone an assault that began on Feb. 28, 1993, with the ATF shooting of their Alaskan Malamute, Fawn, and her four pups in a pen outside the compound. Shooting dogs is apparently a pet tactic of the ATF who did the same at Ruby Ridge, killing Randy Weaver’s Golden Retriever. Though someone in the initial Waco assault was trigger-happy, it is still unclear whether the shooting was started by the Davidians or the ATF. The steel door through which the initial shots were fired survived the fire, but is now missing. One of the Davidians, Wayne Martin, a black Harvard law graduate can be heard in “Rules of Engagement” calling 911 from inside the compound begging for help. “They’re shooting, they’re shooting!” he yelled. “We’re under fire! There are women and children in here! Tell them to call it off! I have a right to defend myself!” he yelled as the sounds of gunfire popped on the 911 tape. Alas, though the ATF had brought fax machines and their public relations office had notified reporters of the upcoming raid that they referred to as “Showtime,” they had brought no fire trucks, ambulances, phones or radios! The 911 operator sounded desperate. Though he could hear gunfire, he was unable to get through.

Even an arrest by constituted officers of the law can be legally resisted if the arresting officers use excessive force. A jury in San Antonio ruled that the four dead ATF agents were killed by the Davidians, who had lost six of their own that day, in self-defense. Though no good reason has ever been given for the huge show of force in the initial ATF raid, other than that it was a massive publicity stunt to offset the ATF’s growing reputation as a rogue agency a few weeks before their appropriations hearing, Henry Ruth, one of three independent reviewers of the Treasury Department’s Report on Waco, said, “part of the ATF’s motive, never stated but definitely there, was to enforce the morals of society; to enforce the psyche of right-thinking by retaliating against these odd people.”

There is no need to believe in any widespread conspiracy theory regarding government behavior at Waco. The government went to Waco, armed not with not a conspiracy, but with an attitude and a set of beliefs that, after the ATF agents were killed, hardened into a mission of revenge. Though the Hostage Rescue Team was there, and there were at least 25 children inside, rescuing hostages was a strategy abandoned in favor of a military assault. “A negotiation strategy was abandoned in favor of a military mentality,” said Alan Stone, “nor was there any third party brought in who could speak the same language as the Davidians. The attitude was to show them who’s boss.” When David Koresh’s grandmother appeared at the standoff, telling agents she was sure she could bring him out, she was refused permission to speak with him. “I hope she has told him good-bye,” one of the agents was overheard saying as she walked away.

Though it’s still not clear who started the final fire, it’s obvious to anyone who sees “Rules Of Engagement” that the FBI engaged in extensive psychological warfare and had fire on its mind. At night, the Davidians were harassed with Nancy Sinatra singing, “You keep thinking that you’ll never get burned. Well, I just got me a brand new box of matches, and what I got you ain’t got time to learn. These boots are made for walkin’, and that’s just what they’ll do. One of these days these boots will walk all over you.” An FBI negotiator asked the Davidians if they had any fire extinguishers inside the house. The answer came back that there was one. “Somebody just better buy some fire insurance,” said the negotiator.

“The (FBI) saw all this as working from a military point of view because the people inside weren’t shooting back,” says Stone, “but they didn’t realize they were driving the Davidians to a point of desperation.”

Democratic pollster, Pat Cadell, said recently that Janet Reno is a example of Affirmative Action in reverse. If she wasn’t a woman she would have been fired long ago, he said. “Rules of Engagement” shows a clueless Reno testifying before Congress that the tanks knocking over the walls at Waco were unarmed, and just “pieces of equipment similar to a good rent-a-car,” she said. “Tanks going into a building were like rent-a-cars?” asked an incredulous congressman. More recently, we learn that the Justice Department held back from Congress the 49th page of an FBI report saying they had used pyrotechnic devices at Waco, and hid the probability that the Delta force was active in the shootout at Waco. Mike McNulty is producer of a new Waco documentary which he says shows agents’ machine guns firing on the Davidians as they tried to emerge from the inferno. Rep. Dan Burton is having the film analyzed for accuracy.

Alan Stone says one “of the most inadequate parts of the Justice Department’s report is their failure to describe the decision-making process at the Command Post. I think that is unpardonable. There is nothing in the investigation of what was going on in Washington where they had a situation room constantly in touch with Waco. High officials of the FBI and Clinton administration were making the decisions. What were the communications? What were the decisions?”

John Danforth said his mission will be to answer the dark questions — did the government kill anyone, and was there a cover-up. He should add to his mission a requirement that the FBI and ATF and others rethink their rules when engaged in a standoff against American men, women and children so that such reckless and murderous government overreactions cannot be repeated.

Roger Waters, who wrote and sang most of Pink Floyd’s best music — “Another Brick in the Wall,” “Welcome to the Machine,” and other songs that have been banned in totalitarian regimes throughout the world — is touring the United States. In a line from the song “Mother” at Star Lake Amphitheater near Pittsburgh this summer, the band roared, “Mother, should I trust the government?”

Now, with new admissions by the FBI that after six years of denials by Janet Reno and the FBI, pyrotechnic tear gas canisters were used on the final day of the 1993 government standoff with the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, mistrust of government will justifiably grow, and it should soar among leftists who have been obstinately oblivious to what many view as the totalitarian instincts of the Clinton administration. Even Lynn Samuels, WABC’s super-liberal talk show host, now says she’ll stand with Bob Barr and Henry Hyde to impeach this president if it’s shown that Bill Clinton knew that incendiary devices were used by government agents at Waco.

“This is not an assault,” said the voice of a government official at the scene as an M-60 tank tore off the wall of the Branch Davidians’ home and shot tear gas in their faces. To protect the 25 children inside from child abuse, U.S. federal agents harassed the Davidians and their children at night with massive floodlights, blaring recordings of screaming, slaughtered rabbits, and loudspeakers blaring Nancy Sinatra singing “These Boots Are Made For Walking.” Though allegations of child abuse were never proven, and the Davidians had fewer guns per capita than the average Texan, Janet Reno authorized the agents to saturate the house with CS gas, a gas that is banned by international law as chemical warfare and which medical literature warns may cause children inhaling it “fulminating chemical pneumonia and death.” Before ordering the attack, Reno was informed that gas masks wouldn’t fit the children.

“I was frankly surprised to see that anyone would suggest that the Attorney General should resign because some religious fanatics murdered themselves,” President Clinton said at the time. “There is unfortunately a rise in this sort of fanaticism all over the world,” he continued. “And we may have to confront it again.”

Incinerated in the April 19, 1993, massacre were not just what Clinton referred to as a bunch of religious fanatics and gun nuts, but a little 6-year-old girl, Serendipity Sea Jones, and Wayne Martin, a black Harvard Law School graduate, the daughter of a police officer in Hawaii, the son of a New York fireman, an Israeli named Pablo Cohen, and the eight-month-pregnant Aisha Summers, age 17, and her 1 year old daughter, Startle. On some, the roof fell in. Others were burned beyond recognition like one 7- to 8-year-old boy who, according to the Justice Department, was buried alive and suffocated in his bunker.

Jack Wheeler, a contributing editor at Strategic Investment Newsletter, summed it up quite well: “Let me state things clearly. It is one thing to be laughably incompetent, quite another to be murderously incompetent. I think the President should be impeached and the Attorney General indicted for murder. To hear how over 20 children endured a nightmare of torture by CS poison gas, and then see the Attorney General praised in Congress and hear the President ruthlessly dismiss their deaths in a tone of voice as devoid of humanity as Lenin’s, has for the first time in my life made me ashamed of being an American.”

Even assuming the worst, that cult leader David Koresh, an alleged paranoid with a messiah complex, was a child-abuser stockpiling weapons, and acknowledging that he and/or others within the Waco compound killed four ATF agents who were armed with a plan for a “dynamic entry” that might have involved agents shooting their way into the house, government agents were still obligated not to not use excessive force that could result in harm to the 25 children and more than 50 adults, the majority of whom were women, in order to capture Koresh. The ATF has never adequately explained why they were there with such a show of force in the first place, when David Koresh made many trips to stores in town, according to the local sheriff, and could have been apprehended there.

Like the long missing evidence of tear gas canisters, reports the Wall Street Journal, the steel front door of the house that might provide evidence on who shot first is also missing. Even if it’s proven that Koresh was driven to heightened paranoia by having his phone and power cut off, by being refused medical care, being bombarded with the sounds of dentist drills and blaring rabbit screams — driven crazy enough to shoot at federal agents and burn down his own house — after months of planning and 51 days of a standoff, the FBI and the White House had nothing but time to come up with a reasonable solution. Many experts are claiming that government agents “should have known” what could happen.

For 51 days, FBI agents in Waco repeatedly ignored the advice of their own Behavioral Science Unit that recommended a “soft” approach. Special Agents Pete Smerick and Mark Young wrote a caution on March 5, 1993: “In traditional hostage situations, a strategy which has been successful has been negotiations coupled with ever increasing tactical presence. In this situation, however, it is believed this strategy, if carried to excess, could eventually be counterproductive and could result in loss of life.” Harvard psychiatrist Alan A. Stone, one of 10 outside experts asked by the Justice Department to review the events surrounding the siege, wrote in a blistering 46-page critique that Reno was “ill-advised” in approving the final assault, calling it “a misguided and punishing law enforcement strategy that contributed to the tragic ending.”

Nancy T. Ammerman, a visiting scholar at Princeton, also evaluated Waco for the Justice Department, concluding that the government’s approach “was based on building up a legal case against the group and planning a paramilitary type assault on the compound. In that atmosphere, I believe, it became easy to lose sight of the human dynamics of the group involved, to plan as if the group were indeed a military target.”

For Dick DeGuerin, Koresh’s attorney, the Waco tragedy was the result of incredible bungling, if not outright chicanery, on the part of the ATF and the FBI — aided and abetted, however unwittingly, by Janet Reno, an attorney general who was “new on the job and out of her depth.” A year after the tragedy, DeGuerin, a trial attorney of 28 years who was seasoned enough not to take his trial successes and failures personally, was still furious over his last meeting prior to the fire with FBI agent Jeffrey Jamar, the agent in charge of the 51 day siege, a meeting at which he had assured the agent that in his best considered judgment the Davidians would voluntarily leave the compound in about two weeks. DeGurein says Jamar assured him that time was not a factor. “None of this had to happen,” says DeGuerin.

In the face of this unprecedented attack on American citizens by agents of their own government, a deadly assault that sparked the militia movement as well as the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, an unprecedented silence befell the press. “No one stepped forward to be the Davidians’ friend,” writes Richard Shweder, author of “Thinking Through Cultures,” in the New York Times. “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms spent months planning and rehearsing the largest ‘law enforcement’ operation of its 200-year history. This turned out to be a major military operation, worthy of a police state, carried out against the domestic residence of an unpopular and readily stigmatized religious community. The ACLU does not like guns, and it’s very busy, so it didn’t get involved. The religious leaders of our country do not like ‘cults,’ and the women’s movement does not like patriarchal living arrangements, so they didn’t much care. And no one wanted to seem sympathetic to ‘child abuse’ or unsympathetic to the FBI.”

“Where Is The Press?” wrote one of the Davidian residents on a sheet hung out the window of the women’s quarters of the Waco compound. The press, also a captive of the government as well as its own biases, was kept at bay two miles down the road. The press, coming too late with too little to this story, is only now beginning to wake up. The Dallas Morning News and WorldNetDaily are reporting, contrary to recent statements by Janet Reno and the Clinton administration, according to classified documents obtained through The Freedom of Information Act as well as WND’s sources within the Special Forces, that not only did Reno seek the involvement of the Army’s Commando Unit, Delta Force, but she was warned at a meeting she attended with Webster Hubbell and others that the use of CS tear gas could cause “some people to panic. Mothers may run off and leave infants.”

WorldNetDaily’s source states that he believes, writes Betsy Gibson, that Delta Force was reluctant to get involved at WACO: “I believe the Delta Force colonel didn’t want to be directly involved in it, and did not want to be dragged into it. Delta Force operators and Task Force 160 operators continually cautioned the FBI against attempting an ‘open air assault’ on the target, and stated emphatically that they did not want to be involved in firing on or assaulting American civilians.” These official and unofficial comments went ignored, says WND, and, in fact, one Special Operations officer was threatened with court-martial if he continued to protest, the source said. At another point in the document, Delta Force personnel explain to Reno that Special Forces encounters are almost always militaristic and involve outright enemies who are often heavily armed. Delta Force explains that in its standard modus operandi it is “the principles of surprise, speed and violence of action” that are “essential to any operation,” along with the strategy that “momentum should be maintained and ground gained should not be relinquished.” A WND military source says “violence of action” usually refers to killing the “hostiles.”

A former Special Forces commando states that he recently spoke with a Delta Force commando who was present at the final tear-gas assault on the Branch Davidian compound. Keith Idema, a member of Special Forces and Special Operations units from 1975 to 1992, helped train hostage rescue team personnel for both Delta Force and the FBI. He maintains that the video footage from Waco showing a bright light flashing inside the building moments before the fire broke out have been misidentified as a fire that was started by Branch Davidian leader David Koresh, when, in fact, to the trained eye of a Special Forces explosive expert, it is unmistakably a flash caused by a “concussion grenade” that had been lobbed inside the compound. A concussion grenade employs a brilliant flash and loud bang to render an enemy in its vicinity blind, deaf and immobile for a brief period during which commandos can overpower them. Such grenades should be used only for military purposes and are wholly inappropriate, if not illegal, for use in a situation involving women and children — and in any situation where potentially inflammable tear gas is still hanging in the air, the former Special Forces operative told WorldNetDaily.

Anyone who has seen the movie “Waco: The Rules Of Engagement,” an Academy Award nominated film about Waco, will remember scenes of a 51 day standoff against a group comprised mostly of women and children, helicopters firing at the compound and soldiers machine-gunning the building as it burned. Watching “Rules of Engagement” compels one to wonder exactly who are the paranoids with the messiah complex — David Koresh or administration officials and government agents. Now, there is a new home video by the same producers, “Waco, A New Revelation,” obtainable from MGA Films Inc. at 1-800-277-9802.

Someone recently wrote that if you want to know what shapes a person’s political consciousness, check out what was going on in the world when he or she came of age in their 20s. When I was in my 20s, the Vietnam War had just begun. Women, if they were fortunate enough to go to college, were essentially limited to two careers, nursing and teaching, but what was really expected of them (all of them) was to become mothers and housewives. The birth control pill had just been invented, and the Catholic Church was adamant that no one should use it. I saw a frightening movie, “The Cardinal,” about a woman dying in childbirth because the Church decreed that when given the choice the baby’s life must take precedence over the mother’s. Women avoided Catholic obstetricians in droves if they refused to prescribe birth control pills. Leon Uris’ novel, “Trinity,” documented centuries of oppression of Irish women robbed of the right to control their own bodies.

In the early ’60s, economic power was essentially unavailable to women rendered helpless and dependent on men who were not always promise keepers and not always kind. Half the human race was quite literally defined and limited by the functions of their uterus. Such primitive and rigidly gender-based power imbalances were not good for men, and not good for women — nor were they good building blocks for healthy marriages or well-developed people.

Though much has been written about the corrupt self-indulgence and moral relativism of the ’60s, we were a generation who reached adulthood meeting with widespread expectations to offer our lives as martyrs for the next generation. For women, the sacrifice came in the form of uncontrolled, unplanned and unending childbirth.

For men, it was expected of them to offer their young lives as cannon fodder in a war which was essentially mismanaged, unexplainable and unwinnable. America had not been attacked as it had been in World War II, but President Lyndon B. Johnson assured his young daughter Lynda Bird that her daddy wasn’t going to be the first American president to lose a war. Young men were drafted and killed, sent to war by powerful older men whose own sons were almost universally exempted. Talk about the Culture of Death!

Together, the oppressive power of big government, big corporations and big religion forged a rebellion. We had learned firsthand about the arrogance of power. Just as in physics, in cultural life every action leads to a reaction. Our generation wanted more from life than the culturally prescribed path of conformity and war, stagnation and misery — hence, the ’60s.

It is not easy to overcome natural apathy nor to mobilize people to political action — an undeniable reality discovered by conservatives in the Clinton era. The ’60s could not have occurred without the widespread palpably repressive uniformity and suffocating atmosphere of the ’50s, as perceived by millions of Americans. Though David Horowitz, author of “Second Thoughts About the Sixties,” claims that opposition to the Vietnam war was engineered by him and other red diaper communists, the rebellion was much more than that. The ’60s were a heroic grasp for individual empowerment and freedom, and a rejection of the deadening conformity and mind-numbing grip of the big institutional agencies — government, corporate and religious.

The ’60s grew into a creative burst of epic proportions. Whether it be in music, art, education, writing, poetry, women’s rights, law, medicine, religion, political science, the era has changed American cultural life and American thinking forever, for good and bad, but for far better rather than worse.

Opposition to the Vietnam War is the primary reason American politicians still strive to wage wars with no casualties. There is now an abiding recognition by the politicians, as there should always have been, of the American people’s low tolerance for the tragic waste of body bags and flag-draped coffins. We don’t hand over our sons lightly to the forces of government or politicians whims — nor should we. When waging a war, the government needs very good explanations other than mere blind patriotism to now enlist the cooperation of the citizenry.

It is fashionable lately to blame the ’60s for many of America’s current ills, but the decade was essentially one of libertarianism — an earthquake power shift from the big institutions into the hands of ordinary people. Because of that, we are no longer a society that requires rigid sex role uniformity or economic bondage for blacks, women and gays. We have gleefully escaped the black and white numb conformity of “Pleasantville” and become exceptionally confused and colorful — and it has led to some incredibly interesting times.

Let’s face it, columnists are paid to gripe and moan. For eight years the Clintons were like rocket fuel spiraling us into orbits of indignation. Each morning brought bigger and better disasters, new angles on new conspiracies, fresher body counts, more disgusting things, and an endless supply of audacities, allegations and outrages. I woke up each day propelled to the keyboard even before I drank my Sumatra Blue Ling. It was a great time for spewing.

In an era of a thousand apologies, I was first in line to demand one (See “The White House Owes Us An Apology,” Human Events, August, 19, 1994) for their totalitarian health care plan and the fighting words they used to promote it. Now, with Clinton seemingly already gone and W. ascending, I sit at my laptop facing the blank screen with the blinking cursor, trying to work myself up into a froth of indignation about something, anything. There’s no one to kick around anymore. You know things are cooling down when the hottest argument going on in the Forum section of The Common Conservative.com is about the fine points of the movie “Tarzan.” I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ll see it next week with my grandaughter, Sarah Rose. I did, however, run out last week and buy the soundtrack to Tarzan the first time I heard Phil Collins sing “You’ll Be In My Heart.” And to top things off, Bruce Bedsprings (as he was called by Pittsburgh’s former mayor Sophie) will be touring the Northeast this Fall! Musically, at least, everything is coming up roses.

Lulled into complacency by life at the Jersey shore, whether it be the Sea Isle beach at night with a billion stars in the black sky, or sitting on my deck listening to radio conversations between the lobster boats just offshore while smelling the aroma of wild dune roses, or our beach town by day where nearly everyone is committed to saving the turtles, it is a great time to be alive if you’re a columnist for a magazine like “Coastal Living.”

Too many of our ever-dwindling supply of turtles wind up as roadkill as they make their annual journey from the bay to lay their eggs in the sand. The other day I saw a big guy in a tank top pull his pickup truck to the side of the road and get out to carry a turtle across the highway. Random acts of kindness such as this surely somewhat offset the horrors of things like Columbine.

As we were driving on the road through the marshlands that connects Stone Harbor to Route 9 we saw two turtles craning their little necks at the side of the road, looking to avoid oncoming cars. We pulled over, picked them up and carried them to the marshes on the other side. A woman pulled off just behind us and yelled, “Thanks, more people should do that!” Really, almost everyone does do that. It’s just that sometimes the turtles are not easy to spot before it’s too late to stop. In the autumn, the baby turtles will hatch and try to make their way back to the bay. Their mamas have left them, never to return, and the sea gulls hover over them like vultures, picking them off before they reach water and have to do battle with the crabs. Nature is cruel and life isn’t fair, especially for baby turtles.

We called the Wetlands Institute to see when the turtle eggs will hatch. The timing of their emergence depends on the weather, as does the sex of the babies. There will be females if it’s a hot summer, and males if it’s cool.

Once, when we stopped too fast to move turtles we were almost slammed from behind by a beer truck. Talk about encroaching civilization! Sea Isle City is equally famous for its turtles and the trailer trucks of beer that roll into town to re-supply bars such as the Ocean Drive — advertised as the place where New York meets Philadelphia, but otherwise appropriately known to locals as the “O.D.” where partyers have been spotted lying unconscious on the sidewalk getting oxygen. Along with Sea Isle’s official “Save Sara the Sea Isle Turtle” T-shirts, I saw a Harley guy last week with an unofficial message on the back of his t-shirt: “If you can read this, the b—- fell off.”

The turtles are in trouble, but in the 80 years since our swimmers have been guarded by the lifeguards of the Sea Isle City Beach Patrol, there has never been a drowning while they were on duty. A few years ago, my niece Meghan tired of her cushy job lifeguarding at a hotel pool and tried out for the job of ocean lifeguard. I watched her swim far out into the rolling surf against rough waters propelled by a strong northeast wind, competing in a swimming race with about 100 others, most of them boys. Meghan made it back to shore, finishing ninth. She also had to run and row to qualify, and after much work, with no affirmative action points or special treatment for females, she made it and was a member of SICBP for three years. The other day I asked Brian Wilson, the 29-year-old Sea Isle lieutenant lifeguard who’s been guarding Sea Isle’s beaches for 13 years, how many girls made it this year. “About 8 or 9 out of 80,” he said, “We don’t think of them as girls, we think of them as athletes.”

It’s not always a day at the beach, and on rainy days we went to the movies. Despite all the hand-wringing about Hollywood leading us to ruin, we saw a lot of good films — “Analyze This” being the funniest and best, about a mobster (Robert DeNiro) who begins having panic attacks and makes the reluctant doctor (Billy Crystal) an offer to treat him that the doctor can’t refuse. “The Election,” “Notting Hill,” “Pleasantville” and “You’ve Got Mail” were also good.

On our deck on the Fourth of July, we grilled mako shark, which runs up the Jersey coast this time of year, and watched the fireworks that dot the beach towns — Atlantic City, Ocean City, Sea Isle, Avalon and Stone Harbor. As Keith Richards once said, “It’s good to be here. It’s good to be anywhere.”

Nice country this America. With outrage running on empty, I’d better dial up the editor at “Coastal Living.”

Now that Congress has inserted the Ghost of Anita Hill into every adult male-female interaction, the Supreme Court has decided it’s time to go after the kids. Though school officials say that student sexual harassment is a delicate issue given the raging hormones of adolescence that cause otherwise normal teens to perform acts of superhuman stupidity, the Court is on its way toward blurring the line between adolescent bungling and criminal behavior by making school districts liable for punitive damages if anyone crosses the line. Parents and teachers have been trying to stop teenage stupidity since the beginning of time with little success, but Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and four other members of the divided Supreme Court think they have found the cure: their usual standby — punitive damages — the legal profession’s Johnny-One-Note-Magic-Bullet-Cure for everything, i.e., “Sue for $2 million dollars and call me in the morning.”

Following classmates in the halls, riding past their houses, hang up calls, boys chasing girls, ponytail-pulling and other stunts were once the signs of teenagers in love. The Smooth Operators in my high school used to snap off the girls’ plastic pop-it beads and try for slam-dunks by tossing them down the girls’ blouses. Today, any male peacock strutting his stuff on the way home from school by cruising past a girl’s house in a souped-up car and revving his engine risks being turned in by a neb nose neighbor as a stalker.

Back in the days before we knew these guys were stalkers and harassers, we thought their escapades were funny, even romantic. We used to thrill to songs like “Born to Run” about “dying on Highway 9 in an everlasting kiss.” and “Leader of the Pack.” Real American memories like the things that happened in American Graffiti — memories we could never have had in a place like China where Mao and his government killjoys at the time were outlawing public handholding. Who would’ve ever thought it could’ve happened here?

The best-kept secret in America is that for many of us being sexually harassed was one of the peak experiences of our lives. When I was 16, my steady boyfriend Harry and his gang, the Mad Mechanics, who wore black and silver bomber jackets and had low-slung cars that made a lot of noise, had heard on the school grapevine that I was going to a party at the home of a guy in my neighborhood. That night the Mad Mechanics drove by the party house in an impressive male dominance display, much like the chest-pounding behaviors they inherited from the Great Apes. The neighborhood guys turned out all the lights and hid under the furniture at the first roar of the engines, but in reality, no one was too scared. The party guys, no slouches at predatory sexual moves themselves, used the darkened house as a chance to take off their shirts and kiss the girls while the Mad Mechanics roared on by.

Sexual harassment? Maybe, but it was the only time in my life that I got to feel like Natalie Wood in West Side Story in the middle of a rumble between the Jets and the Sharks. For Harry, who went on to fly hundreds of bombing missions in Vietnam, I’m glad he could go on to adulthood with his Air Force career untarnished by his teenage capers. (Harry and I broke up a few months later when upon arriving at our school picnic I discovered he’d been riding the Tilt O’ Whirl with some girl that he’d probably convinced SHE was the star of West Side Story. He’s now married to a woman who he says was Miss Alabama.)

In his Newsday column, “Lunatic Feminists Arise on the Right,” Robert Reno, an ardent support of the Supreme Court’s heavy-duty legislation to protect girls from sexist language and hurt feelings rails against what he calls the new conservative “female TV gas bags” — women who he says are, “fetching, wall-to-wall right-wing and blond to their roots, like Laura Ingram and Monica Crowley,” women who he designates as “silly,” “lunatic,” “dumb” and “deeply snide.” But these women, bad as they are, are just “irrelevant distractions” compared to the objects of Reno’s real wrath — “the more serious-minded crowd” of women over at the “gloriously right-wing Independent Women’s Forum.” (You have to wonder what would happen to American womanhood without chivalrous defenders like Robert Reno.)

It seems a woman on the Independent Women’s Forum’s Advisory Board had ruffled Mr. Reno’s feathers by writing a Wall Street Journal article in which she remarked that for kids “A kiss on the cheek, a sexually suggestive remark, the persistent pursuit of a romantic relationship with someone who is not interested, even unwanted sexual touching, all may be normal parts of growing up when the individuals are peers.”

“Who raised this woman?” Mr. Reno howls. “You’d never hear Phyllis Schlafley come out for kissing or touching in the classroom. She’d cane the whole lot of them.”

“What a mouthful,” he roars on, surmising that the Independent Women’s Forum is some group of crazed right-wing female renegades defending the rights of third-grade harassers. The Wall Street Journal article, says Mr. Reno, “savages the Supreme Court decision that prohibits boorish little schoolboys from making repulsive pests of themselves by being sexually obnoxious to the girls in their class.” The Court decision “seems the least we can do for the girls who are going to grow up to run this country,” wails Reno, “the way they have run more socially advanced nations, including Norway, Britain, Israel and India.” Reno glosses over the fact that these girl future presidents that he thinks require federal intervention to protect them from third-grade boys will someday have to compete with male presidential candidates who often have been toughened in bigger battles like Vietnam, Desert Storm, Korea and World War II.

The Supreme Court and columnist Reno believe that repulsive third-grade pests will be cured of their sexism and revolting male behavior once punitive damages can be levied against their school districts. One wonders if he thinks school districts should be liable for a hostile environment created by obnoxious kids who pepper their female classmates with names like Mr. Reno uses, names like “gas bags,” “lunatics,” “dumb,” “irrelevant distractions” or “blond to the roots”?

But don’t worry, Mr. Reno, Laura Ingram, Monica Crowley and the Independent Women’s Forum are tough women, experienced enough at verbal sparring to come back at an irrelevant gas bag like yourself. I’d suggest that when you’re done battling with these women, you might try a really tough bunch of thinkers like the feminist libertarians in the Women’s Freedom Network. Though they’ll disagree with nearly everything you say, they’ll defend to the end your right to say it, with no punitive damages — and no petty comments about your hair.

What Reno and other punitive damage aficionados miss is that those of us who argue against high-priced lawsuits as the magic bullet cure for undesirable social behaviors are not in favor of harassment, but are simply concerned about the unintended consequences of current penalties. The constant threat of financial annihilation via punitive damage lawsuits is not the best environment for freedom to thrive. Schools or workplaces that can have their entire annual budget wiped out by a single child-against-child or employee-against-employee lawsuit will be clearly pushed and tempted to go overboard in trying to control any speech or behavior that could appear questionable or actionable to a creative trial lawyer.

“This is already the normal state of affairs in the workplace,” says columnist John Leo. “Sexual harassment law has given employers a powerful incentive to act in a defensive manner, warning workers against comments, gestures, office chitchat about the latest naughty joke on a sitcom. Many schools already ban handholding, the passing of romantic notes and chasing members of the opposite sex during recess. One teacher’s manual says that a child’s comment ‘You look nice’ could be sexual harassment, depending on the ‘tone of voice’ and ‘who else is around.’ ‘Next year, kids will be suspended for behavior nobody’s ever been suspended for,’ said Bruce Hunter of the American Association of School Administrators.”

Beyond concerns about emptying taxpayers’ pockets and bankrupting school districts and businesses, we have to wonder what effect this centralized Orwellian behavior control is going to have on the kids. Squelching spontaneous behaviors like teasing, joking and chasing members of the opposite sex is an outrageous thing to do to an entire nation of school children because a few have gone out of bounds. Instead, on the individual level, third-graders who are truly creating a hostile environment can be punished with school suspensions or some other process without involving the entire school population of the United States in some sort of Americanized judicial version of China’s Cultural Revolution.

The relative nonchalance with which Congress passes sexual harassment laws combined with an impassioned preference for overblown fines is a frightening prospect. Laws are passed with a casualness about the definitions of the acts they are criminalizing and by drifting definitions such as the broadening of sexual assault to mean any unwanted touching. In an article titled “Could You Be The Next Monica?” by Nurith Aizenman in New Woman Magazine, Susan Molinari says she didn’t “set out to make Monica Lewinsky’s life miserable when she pushed through ground-breaking sexual assault legislation five years ago. The Congresswoman only wanted to give a woman accusing a man of sexual assault the chance to bolster her case by showing that he had also attacked other women. Sensible enough — but the law defined sexual assault so broadly (essentially any attempt at unwanted touching) that it allowed lawyers in the Paula Jones case to probe President Clinton’s past for other violations. That investigation, in turn, set an unexpected precedent: Now any woman who’s had a consensual relationship with a man accused of harassment could find herself subpoenaed — just as Monica Lewinsky was. Molinari was astonished to learn that her law was behind Lewinsky’s interrogation. ‘The law was supposed to target sexual ASSAULT.’ she said.”

And consider, if you can, this revealing admission by former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo.: “It was so much more fun to legislate than oversee. You could find many reasons to put more regulations on. We didn’t feel accountable as much as we should have to make sure regulations were being applied reasonably.”

It would, of course, be a gross oversimplification to argue that most cases of school harassment are like the madcap adventures in American Graffiti, or that high school or college harassers are harmless guys like Fonzi or Ted Danson on Cheers, or that girls end up feeling like the stars of West Side Story. Even in American Graffiti, two kids nearly died when their car turned over during a macho drag race. There are, no doubt, serious cases of harassment that need remedied.

In Pittsburgh, there were fraternity parties like those in Animal House, where frat brothers at a local university held “Pig Parties” — parties where the brothers would invite the ugliest dates they could find, and the guy with the ugliest girl would win the contest. The girls, at first clueless about their dates’ motives, eventually realized why they were invited and would flee the party in tears. In cases like these, the punishment should be placed directly at the door of the offending students rather than with the school or with the student body at large in the form of higher tuition payments to cover lawsuit expenses.

In the recent sexual harassment case, Davis vs. Monroe County Board of Education, involving a fifth-grade boy who was prosecuted and found guilty of sexual battery in juvenile court, the Supreme Court ruled that the fifth-grade girl could proceed with her lawsuit seeking damages from the school district. School officials, said the Court, must have been informed of harassment and been indifferent to it or ignored it before they could be sued for it, providing a prudent safeguard for educational institutions — a safeguard that’s denied to private businesses which must operate under the “should have known” standard, a standard that says businesses may be sued even if they have no idea that any harassment is occurring in their workplaces.

And so the question remains, one with which the divided Supreme Court is still struggling. How can justice be achieved for victims of fifth-grade sexual batterers and pig parties without the collateral damage that tramples important quality-of-life freedoms for everyone else? Penalties that focus punishments on the wrongdoers themselves and minimize it to innocent members of society at large would be the optimal solution, but current penalties do exactly the opposite. If the Supreme Court and American law schools would explore possible alternatives to threats of financial annihilation as a wholesale method of behavior control, it would be a good start. At least when the Mad Mechanics showed up they had more than one tool in their box.